CGI overload? Ethan Hawke says Hollywood’s reliance “just cheapens the whole thing”

The new drama The Weight didn’t hunker down on a soundstage. Hawke and the team shot it in the Bavarian Forest, leaning into cold, mud and real weather to sell its Depression-era setting. In explaining that choice, he reached back to a lesson he says you can feel on screen: the lived-in texture of long car scenes with Denzel Washington in Training Day, where the city outside those windows wasn’t a VFX plate.

“It just cheapens the whole thing,” Hawke said to The Hollywood Reporter.

Hawke wasn’t arguing that digital environments can never work. He said the problem is how often they’re used as a shortcut rather than a tool, and that audiences pick up on that difference even if they can’t articulate it.

“It’s not like it can’t be done. Of course, it can be done if the writing is really exceptional,” he added.

According to THR, The Weight follows his character out into actual wilderness, not a greenscreen void. Hawke ties that commitment to his first taste of making movies in hard conditions: as a teenager on White Fang, he was learning lines in the Alaskan snow. That kind of discomfort, he says, seeps into performances in ways computers can’t fake.

Marvel, in a different light

For all his skepticism about digital backdrops, Hawke had kind words for the superhero machine that leans heavily on them. He called Marvel “genuinely good” to him during his stint as Arthur Harrow on Moon Knight, a gig he says came together because of his friendship with Oscar Isaac and landed amid Disney ’s big streaming push.

He also acknowledged being surprised when Marvel’s television output slowed after that surge, noting that no one can really chart the industry’s next swing. More recently, he’s pointed to Sterling Harjo’s series The Lowdown as the kind of television that excites him—work that, in his view, uses the medium to push cinematic storytelling rather than dilute it.